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Forest Drought Resistance Distinguished By Canopy Height, Wei Fang, Peipei Xu, Tao Zhou, George Hendrey, Xiang Zhao
Forest Drought Resistance Distinguished By Canopy Height, Wei Fang, Peipei Xu, Tao Zhou, George Hendrey, Xiang Zhao
Publications and Research
How are the survival and growth of trees under severe drought affected by their size? While some studies have shown that large trees are more vulnerable to drought than smaller trees, others found that small trees are the more vulnerable. We explored the potential relationships between canopy height and forest responses to drought indicated by tree mortality, tree ring width index (RWI), and normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) in the southwestern United States (SWUS) in 2002. In that year many trees had zero tree ring growth due to mortality and dieback, presumably related to drought-stress. With RWI data from a …